Freedom Tiptoes Away

We don't have a choice. We end up giving our data to strange people at call centers because all of the jobs have been moved out of the country (remember all that offshoring?) so the businesses can make an obscene profit. Including those that handle our medical and IRS records. Which is a totally different situation than the government spying on its citizens, listening in on their phone calls and reading their email. Don't you just love when the crew without a clue tries to be disingenuous?

Kerr said at an October intelligence conference in San Antonio that he finds concerns that the government may be listening in odd when people are "perfectly willing for a green-card holder at an (Internet service provider) who may or may have not have been an illegal entrant to the United States to handle their data."

If he really wanted to pay tribute and honor us veterans, he would shut his untruthful mouth, resign and take his lying carcass to a maximum security prison for high crimes and misdemeanors. And take all of his moneymaking cronies who have destroyed the country that 35 years ago I was willing to give my life for, with him.

The coup at home. Indeed. This country may have started with a revolution but we are ending without even a whimper. Next thing you know, the American people will have justified not having elections because the majority never shows up.

I have personalized license plates, so what? It makes it easy for me to remember and even easier to find my car in the parking lot. Especially since my red car is no more. Vanity has nothing to do with it. Convenience does.

Oh look, the Bush administration screws up once again. For a party that wants government so small that they can drown it in a bathtub, they don't do a very good job of getting the best bang for their buck. Another program over budget and unable to get off the ground. So much for the war on terror. They want to spy on American citizens for no reason, tracking us wherever we go and listening in on who we talk to, but they can't build a working spy satellite to track the real bad guys. Why aren't I more surprised?

Boeing had never built the kind of spy satellites the government was seeking. Yet when Boeing said it could live within the stringent spending caps imposed by Congress and the satellite agency, the government accepted the company’s optimistic projections, a Panglossian compact that set the stage for many of the travails that followed. Despite its relative inexperience, Boeing was given responsibility for monitoring its own work, under a new government policy of shifting control of big military projects to contractors. At the same time, the satellite agency, hobbled by budget cuts and the loss of seasoned staff members, lacked the expertise to make sound engineering evaluations of its own.

Sigh.